A few days ago, about a dozen articles and campaign sites criticising EU plans for copyright censorship machines silently vanished from the world’s most popular search engine. Proving their point in the most blatant possible way, the sites were removed by exactly what they were warning of: Copyright censorship machines.
Among the websites that were […]
more ›After years of public pressure, the European Commission has just published a groundbreaking legal proposal to protect people who expose wrongdoings in Europe from lawsuits and retaliation.
The Commission used to resist calls for a whistleblower directive, saying that this was outside EU competence. To show that it could be done, my group in the European Parliament, the […]
more ›Should the EU introduce an extra copyright for news sites, restricting how we can share news online? The controversy around this plan continues to brew – this time in the Council, where the member state governments are trying to find a consensus.
The member states have failed to reach an agreement in the Council’s expert group on […]
more ›Is it a good idea to introduce an extra copyright for news sites in the EU, which would make sharing news articles with little snippets of their content illegal, unless licensed? The Legal Affairs Committee of the European Parliament commissioned an independent academic study to find out.
The results came back crystal clear. But if […]
more ›Good news in the latest chapter of the fight over whether the EU should mandate the installation of “censorship machines” on internet platforms as part of the upcoming copyright reform:
The Civil Liberties Committee of the European Parliament today threw its weight behind a more sensible way forward than the one demanded by media conglomerates and proposed […]
more ›« Back to overview Proposal Consequences Debate EU Parliament Take action
Article 13 in conjunction with Recitals 38 and 39 of the proposed EU copyright reform/expansion
Also called: Article 13, Censorship Machines, Value Gap, Transfer of Value, Upload monitoring, Robocopyright, #DeleteArt13, #SaveYourInternet
Commission proposal
Internet platforms hosting “large amounts” of user-uploaded content must monitor user behavior and […]
more ›Preliminary version adopted in plenary on July 9, 2015 – subheadings added
Changes to previous version (Legal Affairs Committee) shown as strikethroughs
See Parliament website for PDF download and official translationsBackground on the report: Context, status, next steps
Recitals A. whereas the revision of Directive 2001/29/EC is central to the promotion of creativity […]
more ›The European Parliament’s Legal Affairs committee on Tuesday voted on draft legislative proposals on the protection of trade secrets. While the Parliament’s proposals are a slight improvement on the original Commission proposals, my demands on improving transparency requirements were not heard.
Constance Le Grip’s report was adopted with eighteen votes in favour, two against and […]
more ›National borders on the web are here to stay: The Commission’s draft strategy falls far short of establishing a digital single market in Europe – this is my assessment of the draft digital single market strategy which was leaked by Politico yesterday.
The ambition to ‘break down national silos‘ in the EU’s copyright framework has given way to timid […]
more ›This is from the Department of Who-could-have-seen-this-coming:
As a reaction to a change in Spanish copyright law (Article 32.2) effectively requiring payment for the right to link to newspapers, for example as part of a news aggregator, Google has announced today it is going to shut down “Google News” in Spain and will remove links to […]
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